MILAN — Halfway through her signature race, American speedskater Erin Jackson appeared to be in strong position to challenge for a podium spot.
The 2022 Olympic champion in the 500 meters was closely pursuing world record holder and pre-race favorite Femke Kok down the backstretch.
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Then, just before she entered the curve, Jackson briefly lost her balance. In a one-and-a-quarter-lap race where milliseconds matter, that turned out to be the difference between Jackson wearing a medal around her neck or going home empty-handed.
Kok turned on the afterburners and left Jackson behind, taking gold in an Olympic record 36.49 seconds. Jutta Leerdam of the Netherlands took silver in 37.15, a reversal of their one-two finish in the women’s 1,000 when it was Leerdam who edged Kok for gold.
Jackson settled for fifth place, more than eight tenths of a second behind the winner but only five hundredths of a second shy of bronze. It was a disappointing near miss for a skater who has endured an injury-plagued season yet arrived in Milan ranked No. 3 in the world in speedskating’s shortest, most explosive race.
Gold medallist Femke Kok of the Netherlands competes against Erin Jackson of the U.S., rear. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
“The back stretch, my feet got away from me a little bit,” Jackson said. “I had a little stumble going into the second corner. And then I just finished as strong as I could. Overall I’m pretty happy with the race, but it sucks to miss out on the podium by so little, especially with a stumble midway through.”
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Had the 33-year-old Jackson made the podium, it would have added to her remarkable list of accomplishments since transitioning from the roller rink to the ice in adulthood less than a decade ago. When she won in Beijing four years ago, she became the first Black woman to earn a Winter Olympics gold in an individual sport. She followed that by winning two more World Cup titles in the women’s 500 and by being elected by her teammates to serve as one of Team USA’s two opening ceremony flag bearers nine days ago.
Whereas most of her competitors come from regions where winter sports thrive, Jackson grew up in sun-kissed Ocala, Florida, more than an hour from the nearest ice rink. Her skating career began on wheels, not blades.
For more than three decades, Renee Hildebrand has been training Ocala kids to become inline speedskating world champions. Promising young athletes seldom gravitate toward inline speedskating on their own, so Hildebrand would seek out talent by sidling up to parents at youth soccer games or open skate sessions at roller rinks.
Hildebrand told Yahoo Sports before the Beijing Olympics that she first spotted Jackson not long after her mother enrolled her in artistic roller skating. At the time, Rita Jackson envisioned her 7-year-old daughter as a figure skater on wheels.
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“I’d come to the rink and she’d be flying around on her little art skates,” Hildebrand recalled. “Her teacher would be like, ‘Slow down, you’ve got to do your jump!’ She’d be like, ‘I just want to go fast!’”
Hildebrand sought out Jackson at the rink and told her, “You need to do speed skating.” Within months of her first in-line speedskating practice, Jackson was pushing her older teammates and displaying world-class potential as a sprinter.
At age 24, after graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in materials science and engineering, Jackson finally decided to see if she could have the same success on ice that she did on a roller rink. She followed in the footsteps of fellow Ocala natives and Hildebrand pupils Brittany Bowe and Joey Mantia, who had already made that transition and were beginning to find their footing.
Jackson’s story went mainstream in early 2022 after she nearly blew her chance to qualify for the Beijing Olympics. She slipped while racing the 500 at the U.S. Olympic Trials and could only salvage third place in a race she had been heavily favored to win.
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Only the top two skaters qualified for the Olympics, but Bowe selflessly gave up her own spot in the 500 so her close friend could replace her and USA Speedskating could send its strongest possible team. Jackson then validated Bowe’s sacrifice a month later by surging to a historic Olympic gold.
Jackson remained one of the top women’s speedskating sprinters in the world after the Beijing Games, but injuries have sent her tumbling down the standings this season. A hamstring injury forced her to withdraw from a World Cup event in December and skate cautiously for the next few weeks. She also endures lingering pain from herniated discs in her lower back.
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When Jackson arrived in Milan, she described herself as “feeling great” and “ready to go.”
“My hamstring is as good as it’s been,” she said. “My back is same old, but I’ve gotten used to dealing with it.”
The first test was the women’s 1,000, a race that Jackson began contesting only during this Olympic cycle. She finished off the medal stand in sixth place, her second-best result at that distance against global competition.
Then on Sunday came the 500, Jackson’s signature race, the one where a podium finish was far more realistic.
“I will need to have a really clean race,” Jackson said earlier this week.
It wasn’t quite clean enough.
